Olympics: A Survey of Banned Substances

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The use of performance-enhancing drugs among athletes competing in the Olympic Games is not new—as early as
1904, American runner Thomas Hicks was given doses of strychnine during the marathon at the Summer Olympics
in St. Louis, Missouri. He ended up winning the race after the first-place finisher was disqualified for completing
part of the marathon by car. Today—thanks in part to large television audiences and massive commercialization,
which have instilled in many viewers an idealistic picture of the Olympic athlete—there has been a significant
crackdown on the use of performing-enhancing substances. Leading the fight against drug use in sports is the
World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an organization established in 1999 under an initiative led by the International
Olympic Committee. Over the years, WADA’s Prohibited List—a compilation of substances banned from sport—has
grown to include not only more drugs but also additional methods of doping, including gene doping.
What’s the Difference Between a Résumé and a CV?

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Preparing a summary of work experience and skills is a critical part of the job-seeking process. But for young job
seekers, fresh out of high school, college, or postgraduate programs, one of the first obstacles encountered is
whether you should prepare a résumé or a CV. But what is the difference between the two, and why does it matter
when applying for a job?

The term résumé comes from the French résumer, meaning “to summarize,” while CV is an abbreviation for the
Latin curriculum vitae, meaning “course of (one’s) life.” Hence, the biggest difference between a résumé and a CV
is length. A résumé provides a concise overview of one’s education, work experience, credentials, and relevant
skills, typically fit to a single page. A CV on the other hand often is multiple pages in length and presents a detailed
summary of academic background and degrees, job experience, research, publications, presentations and lectures,
honors, and other accomplishments.

Résumés and CVs also differ in that the former usually is tailored to the specific job of interest. A résumé
generally features only the experience and skills that relate directly to the job description. A CV may be tailored to
a minor extent, such as by highlighting specific skills relevant to the job, but otherwise requires little editing or fine-
tuning from one job application to next. CVs simply grow over time as new publications, skills, and achievements
are added to the document.
In addition, CVs generally are favored in academia and are used almost exclusively when applying for almost any
job in a country other than Canada or the United States. In many cases, companies, schools, or other institutions
that are recruiting new employees are clear about which type of document they prefer, eliminating much of the
guesswork for applicants.

Why Do Movie Theaters Serve Popcorn?

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The savory smell. The crunchy bite. The salty kick. The buttery finish. Americans will recognize the smell and flavor
of their favorite moviegoing snack anywhere. Why is it that we feast our taste buds on these crisp kernels while
our eyes feast on the big screen?

A few converging aspects made popcorn the quintessential movie snack, according to Andrew F. Smith, author
of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America. Mostly, it boiled down to the snack’s price,
convenience, and timing. Popcorn was cheap for sellers and for customers, and making it didn’t require a ton of
equipment. Popcorn also became popular at a time when movie theaters were in desperate need of an economic
boost, which is how popcorn got introduced to the silver screen.

Fun fact: popcorn does not refer to the popped kernel alone. It’s also the name for the specific type of corn that is
used to make the snack. It was originally grown in Central America and became popular in the U.S. in the mid-
1800s. Compared with other snacks at the time, it was supereasy to make, and it got easier in 1885 when the
mobile steam-powered popcorn maker was invented. What hit the streets in the late 19th century was a fleet of
independent popcorn purveyors. They were like the great-great-grandfathers of food trucks.
Since popcorn was cheap to make, it was also cheap to buy, which increased the popularity of this treat during the
Great Depression. The Depression increased consumer spending on cheaper luxury items such as popcorn and
movies, and the two industries teamed up. Theaters would allow a particular popcorn salesman to sell right
outside the theater for a daily fee. By the mid-1940s, however, movie theaters had cut out the middleman and
begun to have their own concession stands in the lobby. The introduction of the popcorn-driven concession stand
to movie theaters kept the movie theater industry afloat, and popcorn has been a movie-watching staple ever
since.

Why Is It Called Black Friday?

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The day following Thankgiving—commonly referred to as Black Friday—has become one of the busiest shopping
days of the year in the United States. National chain stores traditionally offer limited money-saving specials on a
wide variety of goods in an effort to lure shoppers into stores while offering similar deals online.

It is believed by many that the term Black Friday derives from the concept that businesses operate at a financial
loss, or are “in the red,” until the day after Thanksgiving, when massive sales finally allow them to turn a profit, or
put them “in the black.” However, this is untrue.

A more accurate explanation of the term dates back to the early 1960s, when police officers in Philadelphia began
using the phrase “Black Friday” to describe the chaos that resulted when large numbers of suburban tourists came
into the city to begin their holiday shopping and, in some years, attend Saturday’s annual Army-Navy football
game. The huge crowds created a headache for the police, who worked longer shifts than usual as they dealt with
traffic jams, accidents, shoplifting, and other issues.
Within a few years, the term Black Friday had taken root in Philadelphia. City merchants attempted to put a
prettier face on the day by calling it “Big Friday.”

The phrase “Black Friday” to signify a positive boost in retail sales didn’t grow nationwide until the late 1980s,
when merchants started to spread the red-to-black profit narrative. Black Friday was described as the day stores
began to turn a profit for the year and as the biggest shopping day in the United States. In truth, most stores saw
their largest sales on the Saturday before Christmas

In recent years, Black Friday has been joined by other shopping holidays, including Small Business Saturday, which
encourages shoppers to visit local retailers, and Cyber Monday, which promotes shopping online.

Historically, Black Friday has yet another connotation, one unrelated to shopping. In 1869 Wall Street financiers Jay
Gould and Jim Fisk attempted to corner the nation’s gold market at the New York Gold Exchange by buying as
much of the precious metal as they could, with the intent of sending prices skyrocketing. On Friday, September 24,
intervention by President Ulysses S. Grant caused their plan to fall apart. The stock market instantly plummeted,
sending thousands of Americans into bankruptcy.

Why Do Airlines Overbook Seats on Flights?

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Traveling by air can be a stressful activity. There’s turbulence, baggage limitations, intrusions by airport security,
and the overhyped fear of plane crashes. If these annoyances weren’t enough, once a passenger finally makes it to
their gate, they face the possibility of being “bumped”—that is, kept from occupying the seat they purchased
because the flight was oversold. Why do airlines oversell their flights?  In other words, why do they sell more spots
on the aircraft than there are seats?

The short answer to this is economics: airlines want to make sure that every flight is as full as possible to
maximize their profits. The reported reason why airlines routinely oversell their seats is to recover costs the airline
incurs for seat cancellations and for travelers who do not show up to take the flight. (On any given flight, some
number of previously allocated seats go empty just before departure.) Empty seats are not profitable, so
overbooking allows the airline to ensure that every seat on the airplane is making moneyfor them. The “no-show
rate,” which helps airlines determine how many extra tickets to sell, is determined by data from past flights
connecting the same points. For example, if the data from most of an airline’s flights from Phoenix to
Houston indicate that five passengers typically do not show up for the flight, the airline will sell five additional
tickets. Such calculations are not perfect, and sometimes more people show up for the flight than there are seats
on the aircraft, which forces the bumped passengers and the airline to work out an arrangement (such as
rebooking on a later flight or remunerating with air-travel vouchers or cash) before the flight can depart.

The overbooking process is also said to benefit people who purchase last-minute tickets. If a flight has extra seats
available before the flight leaves the gate, these can be sold at discounted rates, which allows the airline to garner
some of the revenue that they would otherwise have lost. However, all seats are not equal. Passengers in the
coach and business classes of a flight are the ones that are bumped most often. Airlines rarely choose to risk the
ire of those traveling first-class, because first-class seats produce the most revenue per flight. In addition, frequent
fliers, passengers who check in to the flight early, and those whose air-travel itinerary would be most disrupted by
being bumped have greater clout in these situations than the occasional traveler or the traveler who checks in just
before departure time.

Do Sharks Really Die if They Stop Swimming?

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It’s a widespread belief: If sharks stop swimming, they die. But is that actually true?

Let’s find out.

If you look at the nurse shark and the tiger shark, this belief is already proven false: these, and a few other shark
species, can stop swimming whenever they want. They breathe by way of buccal pumping, actively “inhaling”
water by using cheek muscles to draw it into the mouth and over the gills. This allows sharks to stop moving but
continue breathing. They can rest on the ocean floor without worry and can even partially bury themselves in the
sand, using respiratory openings behind the eyes, called spiracles, to pull water through their gills when their
mouths are covered.

But some shark species don’t have the luxury of buccal pumping. For example, the great white shark, the whale
shark, and the mako shark don’t have buccal muscles at all. Instead, these sharks rely on obligate ram ventilation, a
way of breathing that requires sharks to swim with their mouths open. The faster they swim, the more water is
pushed through their gills. If they stop swimming, they stop receiving oxygen. They move or die.

Other shark species, such as the reef shark, breathe using a combination of buccal pumping and obligate ram
ventilation. When swimming slowly, they can use buccal pumping to supplement the amount of oxygen received
from ventilation. And if they choose to stop moving for a few minutes, they won’t risk their life, though they
generally aren’t as adept at stillness as sharks that breathe by buccal pumping alone.

Of these three ways that sharks breathe, the combination of buccal pumping and obligate ram ventilation is by far
the most common. Most kinds of sharks, then, won’t die if they stop swimming.

So why do many people think they will?

Sharks are often compared to boney fish, a class of fishesthat breathe through obligate ram ventilation. Since all
bony fish are constant swimmers, many people assume that all sharks are too. Even people who don’t make that
connection may ask, “Have you ever seen a sleeping fish?”

Before we go, here’s another myth to be busted: all fish other than sharks die if they stop swimming. In reality,
breathing in nonshark fish species is just as varied as it is in shark species. Some fish sleep on the ocean floor just
as some sharks do. Maybe people who think otherwise simply haven’t visited those fish at bedtime.

How Do Microwaves Work?

© Rostislav Sedlacek/Fotolia
Microwave Ovens were life altering from the moment they began humming and heating in homes of the 1970s.
The sprinter to the conventional oven’s cross-country runner, microwaves quickened the process of cooking and
reheating meals, saving time and increasing the potential for leisure over work. The mechanics of the microwave
were, from the very start, mysterious. It seems to be a magical metal box that spins and heats food by invisible
means rather than heating the air and everything around it by conduction from a flame (as was the norm).
Microwave users also came to accept the odd rules of the technology: no metal, no meltable plastics, and stir to
cook evenly. So what is the magic behind the microwave?

Microwave ovens cook foods by injecting them with, surprise, microwaves—a form of energy. These
electromagnetic waves are invisible to the human eye and fall between radio waves, which are longer in
wavelength, and infrared waves, which are shorter. Inside the guts of a microwave, a device called a
magnetron channels electrical energy from a power outlet to a heated filament, creating a flow of electrons that in
turn transmits microwaves into the cooking chamber through an antenna. Microwaves bounce around in the
chamber and cook food through radiation healing —exciting molecules within an object—by becoming lodged in
water, sugars, and fats. Because the microwaves can travel only so far into an object before losing momentum,
the outsides of thicker foods become heated by microwaves, and the insides are heated subsequently by the
conductive transfer of heat from the outsides.

So how do the common microwave rules make sense with these mechanics? Certain types of plastics are able to
absorb microwaves like foods do, making them prone to melting, dissolving, and therefore contaminating the food
cooked on or in them. Metal reflects microwaves and therefore interferes with the movement of the waves inside
the ovens. And stirring food, at least that which can be stirred, helps to spread the heat, ensuring that the inside is
cooked as well as the outside.
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Who Invented the Internet?

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What most of us think of as the internet is really just the pretty face of the operation—browser windows, websites,
URLs, and search bars. But the real Internet, the brain behind the information superhighway, is an intricate set of
protocols and rules that someone had to develop before we could get to the World Wide Web. Computer
scientists Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are credited with inventing the Internet communication protocols we use
today and the system referred to as the Internet.

Before the current iteration of the Internet, long-distance networking between computers was first accomplished
in a 1969 experiment by two research teams at UCLA and Stanford. Though the system crashed during the initial
attempt to log in to the neighboring computer, the researchers, led byLeonard Kleinrock, succeeded in creating the
first two-node network. The experiment was also the first test of “packet switching,” a method of transferring data
between two computer systems. Packet switching separates information into smaller “packets” of data that are
then transported across multiple different channels and reassembled at their destination. The packet-switching
method is still the basis of data transfer today. When you send an email to someone, instead of needing to
establish a connection with the recipient before you send, the email is broken up into packets and can be read
once all of the packets have been reassembled and received.

Cerf and Kahn developed a set of guidelines for data transfer using packet switching in 1980, calling those
guidelines TCP/IP, or Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. The TCP part of the protocol is in charge
of packing the data before it moves across the network and unpacking it once it has arrived. The IP component acts
as the trip coordinator and maps the movement of information from its start point to its end point. While
Kleinrock’s experiment proved that a single network between two computer systems was possible, Cerf and
Kahn’s TCP/IP provided the backbone for an efficient and large web of interconnected networks—thus the name
“Internet.” Though other protocols were developed and used before TCP/IP, such as the file transfer protocol
(FTP) and network control protocol (NCP), the Internet as we know it today is built on the basis of Cerf and Kahn’s
“network of networks.”